How tourism changed China: Lonely Planet’s first guide to country reveals extent of its evolution
- Published 35 years ago, the book documents a nation barely recognisable today
- Despite being littered with flaws and short on practical information, the travel bible gave backpackers in the newly opened country something to talk, debate and bitch about
The guidebook is on the verge of joining spats and the rotary dial telephone as an object whose purpose needs explaining to children. But back in the 1980s, long before online travel forums were a twinkle in Daddy’s iPhone, young travellers sitting down to meals at shared tables in Beijing backstreet guest houses brought out neither smartphones nor tablets, but copies of a certain book.
In those pre-TripAdvisor days, when China had opened to independent travel without bothering to tell anyone, travel information about the country had to be bought in bookshops before leaving home, and updates to that information learned by talking to other travellers randomly encountered at restaurant tables.
Updates were always needed. Conversations over dinner with newly made acquaintances would begin with, “Where in China have you been?”, “Where did you stay?” and “What was worth seeing?” but would then invariably turn to the inaccuracy and inconsistency of the guide.
Nevertheless, for most it comprised almost the sum total of their knowledge of China, which ran the gamut from the best place to find banana pancakes to the Mandarin for ice-cream (bingqilin). They clung fiercely to the guide for fear of otherwise drowning in a sea of incomprehension.
There was never any doubt as to which volume was meant by “the guide”. As far as budget independent travellers were concerned, there was only one: Lonely Planet’s China – A Travel Survival Kit, by Alan Samagalski and Michael Buckley, first published in 1984. Its cover showed a woman farmer in a jacket of uniform blue, with trousers rolled up, knee-deep in a paddy field of impossibly lurid green. Most readers would only ever fleetingly glimpse such a scene at a distance and from a train window.
Everyone had a copy, except for the odd individual, who, in his own opinion, was so cool he could be mistaken for a bingqilin. This guy would sit back with a patronising smirk and say, “I never buy guidebooks.”
